Credit Tickle Me Elmo for sparking the idea to make robots that speak an Indigenous language.

The idea came to roboticist and inventor Danielle Boyer when she saw an Elmo doll in the toy aisle of a store.

“When you poked him, he would talk and teach you things like the alphabet or numbers. And I remember looking at him and thinking, why don’t we have any toys for our kids that speak my language?” Boyer said at a workshop at the Hood Museum of Art on Sept. 21 as part of the two-day Artificial Intelligence and Indigenous Innovations symposium.

Years later, Boyer, a member of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians, created the SkoBot, a wearable robot that speaks Anishinaabemowin, the language of her people.

Named as one of the 100 most influential people in AI in 2026 by Time magazine, Boyer has built a career creating free science and tech resources for Indigenous children, especially girls.

When she was 18, she founded the STEAM Connection, a nonprofit organization that produced robot kits made from recycled plastic and gave them to schools and programs that enrolled Indigenous kids.

“I think robots are really great for our youth because it teaches technical skills in an all-encompassing way,” Boyer said. “It teaches hardware, soldering, computer science, mechanical engineering, all in a project-based way. And if you do it incorrectly, the robot doesn’t work. So, it’s a really good way to figure out if you’re doing things right or wrong.”

Growing up in a tribal service area in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, Boyer and her peers repeatedly came up against barriers that make it harder for Indigenous youth to access educational opportunities. She spoke of the high costs to join robotics teams as well as the harassment she and others faced when they did enter these spaces.

“I took all those experiences that I had, and negativity within science and tech, and I wanted to turn it into something positive,” she said.

Digital literacy skills are especially vital now, said Boyer. At a time when, on the one hand, polarizing narratives about AI constantly flood the internet, and on the other, there are concerns about the misappropriation of Indigenous languages by AI companies, “it’s really important for our youth to be able to sort through the good and the bad.”

Boyer had planned an interactive workshop with several robots for the 40 registered attendees to interact with at the Hood Museum workshop. However, the suitcase carrying the robots was lost in transit and Boyer pivoted to a presentation and talk. She spoke at length about her work in ethical artificial intelligence and the need for Indigenous communities to have control over how their languages and knowledge are used in technology.

The consent, participation, and representation of the community have all been thoughtfully woven into the SkoBots she created to teach Anishinaabemowin words and phrases to children.

It is estimated that fewer than 1,000 people in the U.S. speak the language fluently today. The SkoBot is a bid to reverse the loss of language speakers by introducing it to children in a fun way. The robots, which can be worn on the shoulder, are distributed to Tribal schools as “class pets” for kids to interact with.

Decorated with intricate woodland floral designs, the dome-shaped SkoBot that successfully made the trip with Boyer could easily fit in a shoebox. “Listen, what is ‘bear’?” Boyer asked the tan-colored robot. “Makwa,” it responded in a child’s voice.

The robot is programmed to convert speech to text, and on encountering predetermined English phrases, pull up and play an audio recording of the equivalent phrase in Anishinaabemowin. The audio clips were all recorded in the voices of elders, language keeps, or students of the community.

“Everything has to be pre-recorded in real human speech because we have a lot of pronunciations and dialect-specific things and intonations that need to be in the robot and that technology cannot accurately portray,” Boyer said.

Boyer’s grandmother, who has greatly inspired and supported her and is the last fluent speaker of Anishinaabemowin in their family, was the voice of the very first SkoBot.

The diligence of the robot’s design runs deep. They can function offline because some Indigenous communities do not have reliable Internet access; the software is built by the team and the recordings are stored on internal servers to maintain data sovereignty; and the robots are crafted from recycled materials to minimize environmental impact.

Building responsibly is often overlooked within technology, Boyer said. “There’s a phrase, ‘move fast and break things.’ I think often what’s broken is people and our communities, and I think that we can do better than that,” she said.

Attendees at the Hood Museum event got a chance to interact with the SkoBot and a couple of smaller keychain versions of the language robot designed by her students, which teach children how to introduce themselves within the Anishinaabe tradition.

Boyer concluded her talk by saying that users must ask themselves some important questions when using AI tools, especially generative AI tools, centered around language learning.

“Who built this and who did they build it for? Whose data trained it and did those people agree and consent to it? If a language tool is incorrect, who has the power to say that’s incorrect and it gets fixed?”

As part of a subsequent discussion about the workshop in the Indigenous Environmental Studies course taught this fall by Brinker Ferguson, lecturing professor and research associate in the Department of Native American and Indigenous Studies, Ella Moore ’27 wrote that she liked “how the bot only uses predictive AI rather than generative AI. After learning about Indigenous data sovereignty and language revitalization, it was super cool to see how she is working to address some of these problems through creative solutions.”